Star Alliance Rolling Out Extremely Useful New Services

Now a mature alliance, Star Alliance is no longer in a growing phase, but instead focusing on delivering an improved portfolio of services to its customers. There is much to look forward to.

Simple tasks like assigning seats on partner carriers, receiving frequent flyer credit in a timely fashion, and searching for award space varies widely based upon what alliance carrier you use.

It often feels like the bane of my existence at Award Expert is calling Star Alliance partners for seat assignments. It’s something that consumes the time of my team because it’s simply not an easy process to do.

What if you could assign seats on partner airlines from the app of your favorite Star Alliance carrier, no matter where you booked the ticket? What if you could search for award space on all 28 carriers using any of the 28 alliance frequent flyer programs? Finally, what if you could submit a missing mileage claim (electronically instead of having to mail in a boarding stub) and hear back instantly?

A New Digital Services Platform (DSP)

These are all initiatives Star Alliance is working on. To that end, Star Alliance recently launched its own Digital Services Platform (DSP).

The DSP can gather data provided by an individual member airline or third-party source and make it available to all members, enabling them to build it into their own customer-facing digital applications. The longer-term aim is to allow customers to use any member airline’s website or mobile application to obtain all the information they need for travel on several Star Alliance member airlines.

Star Alliance CEO Jeffrey Goh told me that he hopes to use to blockchain technology to improve alliance connectivity and this may well be the start of it.

Goh added–

Most frequent travellers have a ‘home airline’ in our network and would prefer to control their entire travel experience through a single app or website. We are therefore working to create central capabilities that can be shared for use by our individual members.

I’m so happy that Star Alliance is focusing on the basics. This will be a customer-friendly enhancement that will save every frequent flyer time.

We’ve already seen an example rolled out. You can now assign Singapore Airlines seat assignments on united.com and United Airlines seat assignments on singaporeairlines.com. Lufthansa is also tracking customer baggage, even on partner airlines, using its mobile app. There is more to come.

Four Star Alliance Service Enhancements

Star Alliance is working on four “products” that will make your life easier:

Seamless partner seat assignments

Paperless, efficient crediting of miles

Baggage tracking using the Star Alliance app/carrier of your choice

Online redemption for all 28 Star Alliance partners when using any Star Alliance loyalty program

On the last point, right now it is really only United MileagePlus, Aeroplan, Avianca Lifemiles, and ANA Mileage Club that offer robust online redemption tools for all alliance partners. Star Alliance hopes to roll out this sort of functionality for every carrier in the alliance. Thus, for example, if you have Asiana miles you can easily redeem for Lufthansa online instead of having to call to book.

CONCLUSION

Let’s face it: Star Alliance has fallen behind the times, a bit. SkyTeam already does several of the above services quite well. But playing catch up isn’t a bad thing and I am very happy to see Star Alliance focusing on meaningful customer enhancements.

About Author

Matthew

Matthew is an avid traveler who calls Los Angeles home. Each year he
travels more than 200,000 miles by air and has visited more than 120
countries over the last decade. Working both in the aviation industry
and as a travel consultant, Matthew has been featured in the New York
Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, BBC, Fox News,
CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, Al Jazeera, Toronto Star, and on NPR. Studying
international relations, American government, and later obtaining a
law degree, Matthew has a plethora of knowledge outside the travel
industry that leads to a unique writing perspective. He has served in
the United States Air Force, on Capitol Hill, and in the White House.
His Live and Let's Fly blog shares the latest news in the airline
industry, commentary on frequent flyer programs and promotions, and
detailed reports of his worldwide travel. His writings on
penandpassport.com offer more general musings on life from the eyes of a frequent traveler. He also founded awardexpert.com, a
highly-personalized consulting service that aids clients in the
effective use of their credit card points and frequent flyer miles.
Clients range from retirees seeking to carefully use their nest egg of
points to multinational corporations entrusting Matthew with the
direction and coordination of company travel.

Rather than asking the members to use the respective home airlines apps…the focus should be on a centralized Star Alliance app or portal through which a user can book across the member airlines. THAT will be a unified common experience. I am a gold member and I agree with the author that Star Alliance is far behind in creating a uniform experience across all it’s member airlines

Is there a projected timeline or target date for this? It would be amazing to do all that is started above through my UA app. I just hope Star Alliance is a lot quicker and more efficient than UA has been in rolling out Polaris.

Hooray. I am struggling now to get seat assignments on Luftanhasa after booking through UAL. Many phone calls later, no luck. I go from business and first on UAL to anywhere they choose in economy on Lufthansa. Having been stuck in the center seat, last row, next to a vomiting passenger for 10+ hours before, I am wary. Should have booked them separately. Please announce when these features and service are up and running. Thank you!

The seat assignments are the biggest frustration, but I have yet to see this done well across any two airlines. Seamless award booking would be great but honestly where is the incentive to do that? Airlines want to make it as difficult as possible to use miles particularly on partners where they have to pay another company. So I will believe that when I see it.

Seat selection for partner carriers when booking on one airline is so critical…this is long overdue.
I can get on LH website and book travel which includes flights on UA metal and Select my seats in Biz class (on UA); But If I’m on the UA website booking travel (on LH metal) I can’t select seats (unless I call LH or Swiss etc)
This has always irritated me !

Lack of seating assignment on partner airlines is one of the biggies that has stopped me from booking more flights with partners on UA’s web site. This would be a major change if in fact it did happen.

One good thing I really like about Star Alliance is that the confirmation number is the same across airlines when traveling on multiple carriers. My itinerary last year had flights in ANA, EVA, and Singapore Air and was able to manage flights using the same confirmation number on every carrier’s website.

Compare this with Delta and you have to ask them what the confirmation number is on the partner airline.